Life without Internet

A few months back my 5 year old nephew Mayur was upset that he had to do a science assignment during the weekend. His main concern was that he had to finish googling for his assignment in one hour out of his two hours allotted for games on his mom's laptop.He was cribbing all morning and trying all possible ways to be nice so that his mom would help him doing more than helping him get printouts and stick the animals on the charts. He wore a sad weird expression throughout the morning so his mom and I decided to help him... not with his assignment but with his mood by our talks. We started telling him how we did our assignments - we had to go to the library , browse a lot of books , copy the things we wanted to go into our assignments and then browse through newspaper, magazines for pictures and cut them carefully and stick them up, write down the consolidated information .His mom a doctor told him how she would carry heavy huge books from library and stay up nights after nights copying or making notes and how she would get only the things that were really important xeroxed( days when xerox was pricey and you did not find a xerox shop in every street corner). He was so surprised he innocently started asking many questions why we didn't use ebooks instead of carrying heavy books, why we didn't take printouts instead of wasting time searching in magazines , why we had to get a xerox when we could have saved the page on our desktop(yes that's how he thinks we save files) . When we told him we did not have internet or personal computers till we started our professional courses..he was so surprised and he just couldn't imagine it..he was so full of questions ..how did you send emails, how did you do video chat, how did you get all the information, how could someone spend summer vacation playing outside whole day without playing on psp or laptop, how one could get information on literally everything(he had a big list). He was asking if we always went to ATM(bank according to him) instead of e-banking. He looked so confused and surprised and all his questions made me realise
how dependent we are on internet and how our world has shrunk because of internet. I cant think of going to a store everytime to do shopping searching aisle after aisle..I shortlist things online and get the aisle number from hubby's iphone and my shopping never stretches more than half an hour in store.Imagine if we couldn't make our bill payments online..phone,electric, utilities..phew we would be so tired running around everywhere. Video chats with folks back home and social networking sites to keep us updated about things happening everywhere. Boy! Are we lucky. This little talk with my nephew made me realise how much things have changed since 80's till date ..the black and white tv that stood in the corner of the living room to color tv to projection tv to flat screen, lcd screen n now internet tv..the transition has been amazing.I was discussing this with my hubby telling him about how much our generation has seen ..he argued that its a even bigger unbelievable revolution for our parents generation radios to lcd screen tv's, huge round Dial phones to touchscreen 3g and 4g cellphones, huge weird looking black screen computers to compact laptop,notepad,notebook to ipad. It must really be fascinating for them.
After our discussion I heard Mayur telling his little sister that we were lying to get him do his work ..I was not surprised but I was wondering how the discuss with Mayur and his grandparent's childhood would go..I wouldn't be surprised if he imagined them to be in caves!!